Add an optional "Context" dimension to items

Hi all,

Like all people in management roles, my life has 3 dimensions (+time but this is not of concern here):

  1. the many people I work with
  2. the many projects we work on
  3. the many meetings, discussions, etc we have, which may talk about one or more projects with one or more people involved - let me call that context

Since tagging people in items is both easy and mostly sparse, it’s not a big hassle to manage it with each item as needed and searching for @john mention returns a view of what John either said or did or should do.

This leaves 2 dimensions to manage, which means choosing one as your primary dimension (the one you will use to organise your documents) and having to manage the other one through tags… which is a lot of housekeeping!

Consider:

  • let’s say I choose ‘context’ as my primary dimension, meaning I create one document for each new meeting; then for each item in the meeting, I have to manually tag a project name to make sure I can recover the ‘project’ view - imagine a meeting about just one project, this means I have to redundantly tag each item in the meeting!
  • let’s say I choose ‘project’ as my primary dimension, meaning I maintain one document for each project; then if I’m in a meeting about multiple projects and switch between my documents to insert items relevant to each project, I have to invent some kind of tagging convention to be able to trace each new item to the context in which it appeared, i.e. my current meeting, so that I can say in the future from which context any request/remark originated, and maybe follow on it in the right forum

Both cases may be solved by what I’d say is an optional dimension to be called “Context”: when creating an item, its “Context” by default should be the last Context used, so that e.g. when starting a meeting you set Context as “Capex Project Review - May 10, 2021” and every bullet you write from then is tied to the Context, and when viewing/editing an item, Context should be shown and preserved.

In the end, Context would be kind of a “super tag” that, once set and until disabled, is added automagically to all the items you create, and that would be searchable (i.e. return all items in all documents with context C).

Of course if there are workarounds I am not aware of, I’m interested!

Kind regards,

Suggestions:
a) Organize by context. Probably chronological order? Use #project and @person to get at those connections
b) Use links. If you take notes in a context, then when you’re working on project notes, link to the entry “Capex Project Review - May 10, 2021”. DynaList will show a backlink to the project, and to everything else that references this context.

I can’t say I carefully followed along when reading that, but…

I got the impression you’d like to search by context. The way that’s typically done is to name the context as an item, then nest everything as a child inside. Then, use advanced search operators like parent:context to filter to the children.